Question

In the region of South Texas name and explain the challenges that are faced.

Answer 1

Many of the problems rural Texas faces tend to fly under the radar. For one thing, school finance and the closure of hospitals are not exactly sexy topics. Also, they tend to be slow-moving trends, stories that flicker and creep. There's also the fact that local media have been demoted, and the big-city counterparts don't do much better. The issues matter to the people affected by them people who worry whether their children are going to go to school, if they are going to have safe drinking water and if a hospital is near enough to save their life in a medical emergency.

Particularly in spread-out West Texas in some parts of rural Texas and the Panhandle access to even cursory health care can be difficult to come by. Since 2013 at least 18 rural hospitals have been shuttered in Texas, victims of reimbursement rates for stingy Medicaid and Medicare, as well as the cost of serving uninsured patients. More hospitals could be forced to close their doors in 2018 if Congressional Republicans set their sights on Medicaid and Medicare gutting.

Construction never seems to stop in the big cities of Texas, but sometimes small towns can not afford to repair the aging roads, water systems and other public infrastructure. The U.S. Department of Agriculture helps some small communities get funding to build modern water treatment systems, but the burden of maintaining infrastructure in rural Texas is falling increasingly on local taxpayers, often an aging and shrinking group of people.

When some rural tax bases decline and state funding stagnates for education, some local school districts in Texas struggle to stay open. During the last regular legislative session, legislators allowed a vital source of funding to expire for the smallest districts in the state. And while the Legislature approved hardship grants for some of those schools simultaneously, experts suspect that the grants will not be enough to prevent schools from closing or discontinuing important services.